Jens Jensen The Living Green

Jens Jensen’s message of conservation is as fresh today as it was a century ago. Yet he is barely known out of landscape architecture circles.

Jensen became the most popular landscape architect in America next to Frederick Law Olmstead, designing hundreds of landscapes for public parks, schools, public housing, roads and finally his own utopian school, The Clearing.

Jens Jensen The Living Green will help Americans better appreciate what landscape architecture is and how the early fight for conservation was won through design and vision as much as politics.

Jensen was 'green" before the word ecology existed. Highly ethical and inspired by nature, he created landscapes for Chicago’s working poor filled with “clearings” to clear the mind of the mania of the city. His initial triumph, the “American Garden,” was designed to express America’s natural democracy and to give Chicago a style all its own.

For more information, visit the film's official website: www.jensjensenthelivinggreen.org